


The Recovery

by Derin



Series: Parting the Clouds [13]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 16:52:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 18,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4713362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Derin/pseuds/Derin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tobias was just out flying. He didn't expect to stumble on two hork-bajir escapees. He certainly didn't expect to find himself a pawn in the ellimist's games yet again.</p><p>And now the Animorphs have in their hands the fate of the only two free hork-bajir in the galaxy. Two hork-bajir who the yeerks, it seems, will stop at nothing to capture, taking more risks and pulling out more stops than they ever have chasing the Animorphs. The Animorphs can help them be free or let them be slaves, and whatever they choose, they'd better commit, because if the Animorphs reveal themselves trying to free them only to lose the hork-bajir to the yeerks again, it's all over. But Tobias has been negotiating with the ellimist and might have a little something extra under his feathers...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Much thanks to JustAnotherGhostwriter, who has generously loaned her awesome betaing skills and general support to this project from start to finish and without whom this would almost certainly not exist (and would certainly be much worse), and Pawnofanellimist, as well as my innumerable temporary beta readers. Also thanks to Featherquillpen, who came up with the series title.

My name is Cassie, and I hate sleeping.

I've never been one for surprises. Especially not the kind that wake you in the middle of the night. How would I die this time? Would I suffocate, trying to drag air through my gills? Would I look up at Jake's sneering face while he brought a rock down on my skull? Would I dissolve in a taxxon's stomach, have my skin bubbled off by some alien horror accompanied by Visser Three's strange andalite laughter, be dragged down a pier on the yeerk pool and be forced to commit suicide? Would I fall under the claws or teeth of one of my fellow Animorphs when they lost control for just a second?

Or maybe I'd just have to watch, helpless, as one or more of them died. Maybe I'd have to plead with them to demorph, to save their own lives as I had done so many times before, and it wouldn't be enough. In those dreams, I watch them bleed out in my arms. Sometimes it's Tobias bleeding out in my arms, and in the dream I can't quite understand why he isn't demorphing. Since meeting that ellimist, a new scenario has cropped up occasionally; I'm given a choice that isn't a choice, a choice between my friends and my family, or between them and the planet, or a choice where I just don't know which answer will save them.

How will I wake up? Screaming? Crying? Trembling in a cold sweat, unable to move my limbs? That one I consider to be a good result, because it never brings my parents rushing. Can't afford that. Can't afford the suspicion. Sometimes I'm stuck in the nightmare until the laser fire or crackling heat or Visser Three's laughter becomes the sound of my alarm. That means I get a full night's sleep.

I guess it's not all bad. Once or twice I've had good dreams. After all, we've made contact with aliens. There is life on other planets. Sometimes I meet more andalites, or some other alien race my imagination invents for me. But not often. About three nights a week I sleep peacefully and don't remember my dreams. I can only assume those aren't nightmares. On those days, I can normally keep it together enough to focus. On those days, I can actually get something done.

I don't mean schoolwork. I remember the days when grades were more to me than maintaining a cover. Dimly, but I remember them. I’ve never been an A student. People usually expect me to be, because I don't talk much, and I like to read, and I know a lot about animals from helping my Dad in the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center. Rachel is the A student. Somehow, she has the trifecta – brains, beauty, and the ability to morph into a giant bear and rip things apart.

But good grades had never been my forte, and the war had made them basically irrelevant. So when I woke up at six in the morning after a full peaceful night's sleep, I didn't take out my homework. I headed to the barn. I morphed just enough to give myself owl eyes and scanned the cages.

Birds. We always had a lot of birds. But the Animorphs all had plenty of bird morphs by now. A raccoon. Two squirrels. The forest as a whole wasn't much of a home for seriously dangerous animals, and even if it had been, the Rehabilitation Center couldn't house them. It wasn't where I needed to go in order to deal with the issue I'd been putting off for so long.

Most of us had hang-ups of some kind or another, I'd realised. Jake was obsessed with pretending everything was okay with him no matter how much the war pulled him apart, apparently under the impression that he could hold together by sheer willpower. Tobias had run off to live in the forest, putting himself at completely unnecessary risk when we could get him food and shelter just fine. When things got too much for Rachel to handle, she seemed to think she could solve all her problems with sheer aggression. And I...

I still went into combat as a wolf.

I knew that wolves, while they had a lot of advantages, weren't ideal combatants, especially without a pack. I knew that The Gardens was full of animals far better suited to combat, far better able to protect me, my friends, and the planet. I knew that by stubbornly refusing to get myself a 'battle morph', I was putting us all in danger.

And I hadn't done it. After months, I hadn't done it.

I should. I should fly out to The Gardens and grab something that could tear, or slash, or crush. It wasn't as if I lacked choices. I should get out there and start pulling my weight. I could bring Rachel, although she was still kind of mad at me; we could discuss the pros and cons of different morphs while she kept trying to talk me into getting the biggest, strongest thing I could find and I kept countering with arguments of agility and versatility. I could bring Jake, and we could discuss how a new morph would fit into the team dynamic. I could go get that crocodile that Rachel had been allergic to; they weren't as manoeuvrable as I would like, but they were almost unstoppable.

But that was a problem for later. Since the barn didn't have anything I could use anyway, I pushed the thought out of my head and got started on my chores.

After I cleaned and catalogued everything, I checked the chart to see what needed to be done for what animals. Normally I just do simple stuff like medications and changing bandages while my dad does all the serious vet stuff. One of the squirrels had a wound that I needed to check for infection, but she was very nervous, and pulled away from me when I reached into her cage. Most squirrels could be bribed with food or something, even nervous ones, but we'd had this one for four days and she hadn't warmed up to me at all.

Which would be frustrating, if it didn't double as an opportunity.

Making sure I was alone in the shed, I closed my eyes and focused. I focused on Rachel.

I'd only morphed Rachel once before, and I hadn't liked it one bit. Having a human brain that wasn't my own was... creepy. Too similar to my own mind to for it to be easy to anticipate and handle any differences, but just different enough to feel wrong, like an invasion. Logically, I couldn't think of anything immoral about the way I was using the morph, but it still felt kind of wrong.

I tried my best to ignore that illogical feeling. It wasn't like I was going to go anywhere I could be seen. I just needed a morph, any morph, that wouldn't freak out the whole barn and would leave me with functional hands. Being human was good. I needed to be human, or something like it. But I needed it to be a morph.

I needed to be able to thoughtspeak.

Blonde hair sprouted from my head, flatter and more manageable than my own. I became taller. My face tingled, and I knew my features were rearranging themselves, melting like wax and then reforming.

<Ah, better. Easy, girl.>

The squirrel regarded me with exactly as much suspicion and caution as before.

I collected myself emotionally. What I wanted to try might be difficult to pull off, but if I could make it work, the potential was staggering. Visser Three used thought-speak to create an aura of fear about him; he radiated menace in a way that caused terror, made people hesitate, made people flee. He was plenty terrifying as he was, especially to someone whose introduction to him had been watching him eat a newly acquired ally alive, but that aura gave him an extra edge over everybody. And if he could do such a thing, there was no real reason that I shouldn't be able to.

I didn't want to create a semi-permanent aura of fear, necessarily. But there was a lot of potential in the ability to influence the emotions of others, even if the thought grossed me out a little. Elfangor had given us courage that way, courage that had allowed us to stay in place, keeping us alive.

I'd succeeded, once. I'd used an emotional projection against Jake, or more accurately against the yeerk in his brain, to stir up the instincts of his morph and force him to hesitate. But that had been a quick, and very unrefined, flash. I'd successfully projected raw negative emotion, but I couldn't necessarily control it, nor did I know if I could sustain it. If that was possible for me – and I couldn't be sure that it was, because it might not be safe to assume that our thought-speech and andalite thought-speech were necessarily the same – it would probably take a lot of practice before I could do it usefully. Possibly more practice than I'd put into morphing.

I closed the squirrel's cage before I tried anything. I'm not stupid.

Right. Calm.

I imagined lazy days at the mall with Rachel. I imagined gliding on the breeze as an osprey. That time I spent the whole day at the beach with Jake and Homer. I imagined history class, incredibly boring history class, and I imagined almost falling asleep in it.

I brought up feelings of warm, sluggish peace. My eyes half-closed; I felt a small smile curl on my lips. I mentally aimed for the squirrel in the cage and opened my mind, radiating the feeling.

The squirrel freaked out, running all over the little cage and chittering madly.

I stopped and started to morph back in case the chaos spread to the other animals and brought my dad. Okay, so I'd learned two things. First: non-sentient animals, or squirrels at least (and therefore presumably intelligent mammals, but more tests were needed) could definitely pick up thought-speak. Second, I needed practice. A lot of practice.

I sighed and reached through the bars with my now-demorphed hand, touching the squirrel's fur. She became calm as I absorbed her DNA, calm enough for me to check her legs for pus or swelling. I'd needed a small, agile little morph anyway; the squirrel had a kind of mobility that nothing else in my repertoire had.

“You'd better get used to us soon,” I muttered, “because I can only do that once.”

I noted the squirrel's health on the chart and moved on. There were a lot of animals to check.


	2. Chapter 2

“How?” I asked Rachel blankly.

She shrugged in a slightly embarrassed fashion. “It's just a stupid award thing. It's not important.” Her smile was strained, and not just due to stress and exhaustion. I knew she hadn't forgiven me for pulling her father into the whole yeerk thing. How could she? But if she wasn't going to bring it up again, then I sure wasn't. I followed her lead, and pretended it had never happened.

“Not important?” I glanced around to make certain we were alone. Class was about to start and we'd met out the back of the oval, so there was nobody nearby – nevertheless, I lowered my voice. “We're fighting for our lives on a near-weekly basis against alien invaders intent on enslaving humanity and wiping out most of the rest of our planet, and you still manage to get named a Packard Foundation Outstanding Student? How is that even possible? Have you been some kind of secret genius this whole time?”

“My grades have dropped this year, actually.”

“To what? A-minuses?”

“Anyway, the ceremony's Friday. So, y'know, you can come if you want. There'll be snacks after.” The bell rang, and we turned to head to our respective classes.

“Oh,” Rachel said before I left. “Um. Maybe don't tell Tobias, okay? I mean, not like a secret or anything, just...”

“I understand.” Tobias couldn't go to award ceremonies. She could invite the rest of us, but she couldn't invite him.

I was almost late to class, but it was hard to care about that. Detention had lost all meaning to me, except to serve as a period of time that I couldn't fight yeerks in. On my way into the building, I passed the little door I'd never noticed until the previous week, when Melissa Chapman had pulled me inside to save me from Controllers. The Animorphs, the Star Defenders, the chee... how many groups were out there, aware of what was going on and secretly fighting? Not long ago, I would've walked the halls of the school wondering who was secretly an enemy.

Now, I wondered who was secretly an ally.

If there were other groups out there, it was better that I didn't know about them. While I already knew that I couldn't afford to be taken alive based on my knowledge of the chee alone, there was a slim but nonzero possibility of being taken while unconscious or some such thing. In that case, it was best not to compromise every resistance group on the planet.

I couldn't plan or theorise in class, not really. I couldn't write anything down. If the wrong teacher confiscated it, if the wrong student glanced over, we'd all be dead. So I pretended to care about various school subjects throughout the day while I drew idle, non-yeerk-related pictures in the corners of my books, then went home. I knew I needed to keep my grades up, or they'd make me go talk to Mr Johnson again. I knew that. But somehow, I just couldn't get myself to care.

I went to see Ax after school. He wasn't hard to find. He was usually in his meadow, or in Tobias' meadow, or close enough to be easily picked out from the sky with osprey eyes. I felt sort of sorry for him. He was stranded on an alien planet, far from home, a young cadet trying to fight a war he couldn't possibly win. He'd already lost one brother to the war, and on top of that, he had almost no company. So far as I could determine, andalites seemed to be herd animals. Their desire for companionship was very likely to be at least as high as a human's, probably higher. And here Ax was stuck with intermittent contact with a handful of aliens. At least Tobias had others of his own species in the Animorphs.

Assuming Tobias still considered himself human. I wasn't entirely sure on that point.

Ax was alone in his meadow, doing something with the roof of his little shelter. One of the first things he'd done once he'd arrived in the forest was build a semicircular building from grass and branches. He called it a 'scoop'. It wasn't large – the radius was perhaps one and a half times his body length, forequarter to hindquarter – but it was watertight. It struck me as somewhat amusing, the high-tech andalite living comfortably in a hand-built wooden hut.

I landed at the edge of his meadow and demorphed. He noticed me almost immediately, but waited for me to finish and come over, one stalk eye tracking my movement.

“Hi, Ax.”

<Hello, Cassie.>

“Need any help?”

<No, thank you. I have been performing some minor repairs, but I am finished.> He stepped back from the roof and focused on me with his main eyes. <How can I help you?>

I chewed my lip. I was pretty sure Ax wouldn't be able to help me. He wasn't allowed to share technology with us, and sometimes it was hard to know exactly what andalites did and didn't consider 'technology'. Our ability to thought-speak was a side effect of our morphing ability, after all. But I figured that we were close enough that I wouldn't offend him by asking.

“I'm trying to learn to thought-speak better,” I explained. “All of us Animorphs can only really do words, but Elfangor could transmit concepts, emotions and even pictures. He dumped a large amount of information in Tobias' brain in just a few moments. I don't expect I'll ever be able to do that, but I was hoping to learn to transmit emotions.”

Ax watched me for a long moment, considering. Finally, he said, <I cannot share andalite technology with you, Cassie.>

“I understand. Thanks anyway.”

<But,> he added carefully, <as we are brothers of the blade, it would be negligent of me to refuse to teach you my language. Which is much more easily spoken when one has a good grasp of thought-speak.>

I grinned. Ax can be pretty cool sometimes. “Ax, will you teach me your language?”

<If you wish. I'm afraid that the very basics do not require particularly refined thought-speak,> he added. He said it apologetically. As if he thought there was a chance I'd be disappointed about learning the parts of an alien language that didn't need advanced telepathy.

“That's not a problem,” I said, raising an eyebrow. “I'll just have to learn really fast.”

Ax smiled. <Then let us begin.>


	3. Chapter 3

<The basis of our language,> Ax explained, <is hand signals. Your hands are not quite the right shape, and the lack of a finger on each could be somewhat of an impairment, but you should still be able to make yourself understood, especially with simple concepts. Every finger position, and every movement to a new finger position, is a part of a concept. By interlacing several positions of several fingers, you outline a concept and make a 'word'.>

I nodded, thinking back to how Elfangor and Ax (at least until he'd spent a lot of time with us) tended to thought-speak in concepts that fit together more than actual words. “Andalites think in concepts and fit them together to communicate,” I said slowly. “Humans think in words and use them to determine the concepts they're envisioning.”

<How does one think in words?> Ax asked, frowning. <Surely that would be confusing.>

“Not important,” I said. “Sorry. Please continue.” I put thoughts of the relative likely communication frequencies of andalites and humans out of my mind – plenty of time to muse on that later.

<Normally, several 'words' can be fitted together into a single signal, but it depends on the detail one is giving to each concept. Names are deliberately complicated, and are usually signalled alone, with modifications for tone and intent.> He held up his hands and twisted them together into a complex knot of fingers. <This is my name – Aximili.> He moved his fingers into another configuration. This one, I noticed, required fewer fingers, but still looked hopelessly complicated. <Isthill.>

“And the... middle part?”

<'Esgarrouth', in the middle of a name, describes the flourish used to move from one configuration to the next; the relative position of the fingers as they move over each other.> He showed me, moving from the first signal to the second. <'Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill'. If Esgarrouth were the last part of my name, though, it would look like this.> He moved his fingers into another position.

I tried, as best I could, to say his name with my hands. While I did have enough fingers for his name, they didn't move and entwine in quite the right way, and I couldn't quite remember how they'd all sat in the first place. Ax reached over and corrected me a couple of times, until I was able to say a sort of clumsy version with my stiff, stubby human fingers.

“Why do you have words?” I asked him as I practised the name again. “I mean, hand signals, fair enough. But you don't have mouths. Why can your name be pronounced phonetically?”

<When we andalites first ventured into space, we quickly encountered the oturi. They were a race with no hands, and nothing that approximated fingers. They communicated by making vocal calls, like birds. Or like humans, I suppose. Our two races had to work out a communication system. In the end, we assigned a phonetic syllable to each finger position. They could read our signals and communicate them verbally, and we could listen to their vocalisations and translate them into hand signals. Vocal communication turned out to be so common throughout the universe that andalites are taught to be adept at translating from vocal signals at a young age.>

“But you can thought-speak,” I said.

<We could not do so back then. The translator chip had not yet been invented. And our language is still taught today because we believe that it is important to a young andalite's development to learn language properly before installing a translator chip. Thought-speak is a side effect of our zero-space anchor, much as it is of yours. The difference is that we gain a zero-space anchor through the installation of a translator chip, which is semi-active all the time. Yours is a result of your exposure to the _Escafil_ device, and only active when you are in morph. Tobias is a special case, of course. >

“Of course.” I swallowed. “So, if the fingers relate directly to a concept, and the words relate directly to the fingers, does that mean you can kind of build a concept out of syllables?”

<If you were happy with a relatively crude form of communication, you could probably make yourself understood that way. But it would not necessarily sound natural. There are certain concepts and phrases that are spoken so often that their signs have not changed in an extremely long time. When culture changes around them, this can result in the signs not lining up with the literal meaning of their components any more. For example, this is 'andalite'.> He twisted a few fingers into a relatively simple sign. <But the concepts involved suggest this sign to mean – > he sent me a concept that my mind unravelled after a moment and labelled 'people'.

“How do you say 'people', then?” I asked.

<We have no such word any more. We would instead say something like – > he twisted his hands into a new configuration, this one employing more fingers – <which means 'sentient creatures', or – > he made a slight change – <'intelligent beings'.>

“No single word for 'people', huh?” I tried to recall if I'd ever heard Ax use the word 'people' and not mean 'andalites'.

<No. We used the sign for andalite to refer to ourselves for an extremely long time before we ever ventured into space. There was no need for a word to separate our race from the concept of people as a whole. It would have made more sense to spell out a new concept for our race, but the first spacefarers had no way of knowing that.>

I nodded, filing that information away for later consideration.

<Perhaps we should cover the structure of a signal itself. The first two fingers after the thumb on each hand are the Dominant fingers. These should form the core of whatever concept you are trying to convey. For a single concept, the last four are Accenters or Clarifiers, but if the concept is crude enough, it is possible to convert the last two into a second Dominant set and include more information in the signal. For particularly crude concepts, you can even use _three_ Dominant sets, although this is not recommended if you want to get your concept across with any precision. Now, you can use the thumbs to –  >

<Ax!> Tobias called. <Oh, hi, Cassie. Good, the more the better.>

I looked up and scanned the sky. Tobias and Rachel were both flying over, a red-tailed hawk and a golden eagle, not even bothering to keep distance between each other in case of bird watchers.

That probably meant trouble.

“What's up?” I called, already concentrating on the osprey within me.

<We found something that seems kind of important. We need everyone to help keep it away from the yeerks, because they are going crazy all over the forest.>

<What?> Ax asked. <What did you find?>

<A hork-bajir.>


	4. Chapter 4

Rachel went to alert Jake and Marco. Ax and I followed Tobias deeper into the forest.

<There were two,> he explained. <They came out of a hole in the ground, a yeerk pool entrance I'm guessing. A whole bunch of Controllers chased them. They brought out teams of hork-bajir and taxxons in broad daylight.>

They must have been desperate. <Escapees?> I asked. <Free hork-bajir?>

<That'd be my guess. They recaptured one of them, anyway. But I think we've managed to evade them with the other. For now.>

<In this huge forest,> I said thoughtfully, <isn't it kind of a coincidence that you managed to find this fleeing hork-bajir?>

<Oh, definitely. Especially since it wasn't even where I was intending to be.>

<Wait, what?>

<I was meant to show Rachel a new yeerk pool entrance I'd found in the city. Somehow we kept getting drawn out here. Okay, here we are.>

I wanted to enquire further about how Tobias and Rachel had found the hork-bajir, but we did have a mission. Tobias had apparently stashed the hork-bajir in a small cave, hidden by some bushes. I stayed up as lookout while Ax demorphed.

Tobias landed on a branch outside the cave entrance. <Hey, in there. Hork-bajir. It's me, the talking bird. I'm coming in. With a friend.>

Ax stepped forward, almost dainty on his four hooves. He pushed the tangle aside with his weak arms. He stuck his head inside the dark cave.

The reaction was immediate.

A bladed arm slashed, missing Ax's head by inches. Ax jerked back and cocked his tail to strike.

<NO!> Tobias yelled. <Listen in there, you weed-whacker-looking jerk, calm down! And Ax-man, take it easy!>

The bladed arm withdrew slowly, and Ax relaxed his tail.

Rachel had come into range while all this was going on, bringing Jake and Marco. Jake and Marco immediately landed out of sight of the cave and began demorphing. I could see their intent – they wanted some muscle, in case the hork-bajir was hostile.

<What's going on?> Rachel asked.

<Nothing much,> Tobias said. <We're all just saying hello. Everything clear up there?>

<Everything clear.> I let Rachel take over surveillance and drifted a little lower. I wanted to be able to hear what was going on, not just the thought-speak. I mean, sure, I should have been cautious, but that was a hork-bajir down there. An actual, possibly yeerk-free hork-bajir. The only time I'd ever seen a hork-bajir without a yeerk had been in cages down at the yeerk pool. Who wouldn't be interested in what a giant blade-covered warrior monster had to say? Even if it was mad at our resident andalite for some reason?

<Hork-bajir, come on out,> Tobias said firmly.

Slowly the big creature crawled out. He stood erect, blinking in the quickly dimming evening light. He looked... well, like a hork-bajir. Most of my interactions with hork-bajir had involved them trying to kill me, and I hadn't really taken the time to learn to distinguish any common differences between them.

"Not hork-bajir," he said. "Jara Hamee. My name. Jara Hamee."

<You better talk to our boy Jara Hamee here,> Tobias said to Ax. Ax had had a lot more experience talking to aliens than the rest of us.

Ax held his hands open in a gesture of peace. He lowered his tail still further. I could see he really didn't want to do that. The air between the andalite and the hork-bajir seemed to crackle with tension.

<My name is Aximili,> Ax said.

"You are _hruthin_. Andalite."

<Yes.>

"You kill me?"

<No. I won't kill you,> Ax said.

" _Hruthin_ kill hork-bajir," Jara Hamee said. "Hork-bajir kill _hruthin_."

<This is going really well,> Marco said dryly. He was a gorilla by then. He sang new words for that Barney song. <l kill you, you kill me, we're an alien family...>

<Andalites tried to save the hork-bajir from the yeerks,> Ax said, sounding a little defensive.

The hork-bajir stared at Ax's face. "You _darkap_. You fail."

<Yes. We failed.>

“And then you kill hork-bajir. Yeerks take some, _hruthin_ kill more. Until hork-bajir are gone.”

<I don't kill hork-bajir... unless they are tools of the yeerks.>

Jara Hamee made a sort of forward jerk with his head and a raspy little sound in his throat.

WHAP!

He slapped his chest with his left hand. Then he threw out his arm and announced, "Jara Hamee escaped the yeerks. Jara Hamee free! Jara Hamee has his own head." He pressed both hands gently against his snakelike head.

<How do we know you are free? How do we know you "have your own head"?> Ax asked him coldly.

Jara Hamee looked puzzled. Then, to my complete and total shock, he made a quick movement of his arm.

It was faster than a human eye could have seen.

But with eyes designed to spot fish darting in a river, I saw it. I saw the wrist blade slice right into his own head. He sliced right into his own head!

<No!> Tobias yelled in horror.

<Yah!> Jake yelped.

There was a gash six inches deep in the hork-bajir's head. He reached up with his clawed hands and pulled the gash open. And it's not like it didn't hurt him. I could see the pain on his face.

Blood – or something – oozed in shades of deep red and deeper blue-green. Some kind of thick, tough black tissue lay in layers where one would expect a skull; he'd cut right through that. He held the gash open and we stared right into his brain.

<Oh, man,> Marco moaned. <Can I just say "yuck"?>

Jara Hamee pressed the two sides of the gash together. He held the cut for a few seconds, and with amazing speed, the bleeding coagulated.

A long scab began to form over the gash.

That's when I started breathing again. I had stopped. Then I started my heart up. I swear it had stopped, too.

<Did you see a yeerk in there in his head?> Tobias asked shakily.

<No,> Ax replied, sounding just as shaken. <No yeerk.>

<Did that scare the pee out of you, Ax-man, or doesn't that kind of thing bother you andalites?>

<I am as peeless as you, Tobias, my friend.>

<That wasn't necessary,> Tobias told Jara Hamee.

His face was still scrunched up in pain. He was breathing hard and sweating the same blue-green fluid I'd seen inside his head.

Although the situation was dire and what we'd seen was gruesome, I couldn't help but wonder about the biology of hork-bajir. I very much wished I could understand more than just the basics of what we were seeing.

"Necessary," Jara Hame grunted through his pain. "Jara Hamee is strong. But Jara Hamee needs help."

<Help to do what?> Ax asked him gently.

Jara Hamee stared at Ax, then shifted his gaze to Tobias. "Flying animal saw my _kalashi._ Jara Hamee must find her. Jara Hamee..." He struggled to come up with a word. Then he made a gesture with his hands, as if someone were tearing something out of him. As if someone were removing his heart.

<You love her,> Tobias said.

"Jara Hamee loves," the hork-bajir said. " _Kalashi_ , Jara Hamee free. Want free."

< _Kalashi_? > I asked Ax.

<His wife,> he explained.

Wife?

That complicated things.

<I think I believe him,> Ax said.

<Me, too,> said Tobias.

<We have company coming,> Rachel warned from the sky.

<What kind of company?> Jake asked.

<Fifteen, maybe twenty people. They're strung out in a line. Coming this way.>

I took to the sky and did a sweep a little further out. <I have an equal number coming from the southeast.> I could be mistaken, but in the trees... <They have hork-bajir with them!> Tobias had been right – they were risking a lot for this guy. <They're converging on you. We have maybe five minutes.>

<Talk about bad timing. It's getting late,> Marco pointed out. <It's almost dinnertime. My dad will give me much grief if I don't get home in time for dinner.>

Jake laughed. So did I. It was just so ridiculous having to worry about being grounded when we were halfway surrounded by yeerks.

<We could easily escape,> Ax said. <We can all morph some small animal or bird and not be seen.> I knew he was mentioning it only for completeness. I wasn't exactly sure what the deal between andalites and hork-bajir was, but I did know that discretion wasn't the better part of andalite valor.

<That wouldn't help old Jara Hamee here,> Marco said.

<Distraction,> Jake said. <We need to draw the bad guys away.>

<But the yeerks are looking for a hork-bajir,> Ax pointed out. <Will they be foolish enough to follow any of us?>

<We can only hope they will,> Jake said tersely. <We can get away, but I don't think we can leave Jara Hamee behind.>

<There is one way,> Tobias pointed out, somewhat reluctantly. <They want a hork-bajir to chase, right? Well, we could give them one.>

<Morph a hork-bajir?> Marco asked. <Ewwww.>

<You say that about every morph,> I pointed out. <Is a hork-bajir really worse than a spider?> Of course, unlike a spider, Jara Hamee was self-aware, and not just dolphin-level self-aware. It was hard to tell, from the brief amount of time I'd spent with him, how intelligent he was. He seemed sort of dim by human standards, but he might just have comparatively underdeveloped language skills – just because humans tended to judge intelligence by ability to communicate didn't mean that was a particularly valid measurement for aliens. It wasn't even a valid measurement for humans.

Come to think of it, English had to be at least Jara Hamee's second language, possibly his third or fourth. Which made him a better communicator than me, since I knew about five words outside my native language.

None of which was important right then. The important thing was that he was deserving of human-level respect, which meant that if possible we needed to make our intentions clear and gain his permission. Given the circumstances, that shouldn't be hard.

<I'll do it. I'll morph the hork-bajir,> Rachel said. She glided down. <I need to change morphs, anyway. It's getting too dark for eagle eyes.>

<Rachel might need backup,> I said, following. <Someone to pull the yeerks away if she gets trapped or hurt. The yeerks are going to try for capture and we can't, under any circumstances, allow that to happen. I'll morph too.>

<Cassie,> Jake said, <I'm not sure we – >

I made my answer private. <Jake, if you think there's any chance in the world you can stop me from morphing the cool alien, you're mistaken.> I shifted back to speaking to the group. <We're going to need his permission, obviously.>

Ax nodded a weirdly human nod and focused his main eyes back on the hork-bajir. <Yeerks are coming. Some of my friends wish to morph you. To trick the yeerks. Do you agree?>

"Jara Hamee hates yeerks," the big hork-bajir said. Like that was all the answer he needed to give.

<Okay then, turn around, Jara Hamee,> Tobias ordered the hork-bajir. <Close your eyes and don't look until I tell you. If you open your eyes, this _hruthin_ here... this andalite... will slice and dice you. You got it? Eyes closed. >

The hork-bajir turned around obediently, showing no reluctance in taking orders from a twenty-inch-long bird. It would have been funny if the mission ahead of us wasn't so terrifying. We'd never done anything quite like this.

I mean, we'd run from yeerks before. We'd even used ourselves as bait before. We'd been ripped apart by wild animals and burned by dracon beams and nearly eaten by Visser Three. But in most of our interactions with yeerks, they'd been pretty intent on killing us. They'd seen us as a threat and, while capture would be nice, it was rarely the goal.

Here, we were posing, on purpose, as a target of capture. We were deliberately tempting yeerks to try to force one of their own into our brains, where they would learn our secrets and everything would be lost. There wouldn't be the opportunity to demorph if we were injured fleeing the yeerks, and we couldn't afford capture. We couldn't afford to lose.

The chances of capture were slight, of course. After all, Rachel would be equipped with big, heavy blades that could deny the yeerks their prize at any time.

I did trust Rachel. I had trusted her with my life on several occasions. If she had to choose between her death and the freedom of all of us, I knew she'd choose correctly. But I was going to do everything I could to make sure she didn't have to make that choice. And if it did come up, there was the slight chance that she might turn those blades on the yeerks instead of herself, and they might get the chance to disable her, and she'd be helpless to stop them from...

I let Jake think it was about morphing the alien. In reality, I just wanted to protect my friend.

Rachel and I both demorphed quickly. We each put a hand gently on Jara Hamee's shoulder and focused, drawing his DNA into ourselves. Despite the danger, part of me just couldn't get over the fact that I was having the opportunity to do this. To acquire a hork-bajir, with his cooperation. These terrifying, bladed aliens had been slashing at us since we became Animorphs. I was going to _turn into an alien_. If I wasn't so sick with fear, I'd have been grinning like an idiot.

Okay, maybe it was a _little bit_ about morphing the cool alien.

Tobias bid Jara Hamee to go wait in the cave, and I closed my eyes and started to morph.

It was a pretty straightforward morph, all things considered. Hork-bajir were aliens but they'd somehow ended up with basically the same body structure as us. My feet elongated and I was pulled up onto my toes just as my long, muscular tail shot from the base of my spine, giving me something to balance with. There were clicks and cracks in my shoulders and collarbone as bones shifted into a new arrangement, some disappearing and some changing shape. I grew in size, becoming about seven feet tall, and my skin thickened. I could feel my insides sloshing around and rearranging – I didn't want to think about what kind of organs hork-bajir might have. My skull changed shape, my lips elongated and hardened into a hork-bajir beak. I didn't even want to try pronouncing English words with it.

Finally, rising out of my skin like the fin of a dolphin rising through the waves, came the blades.

Blades on my arms and elbows. Blades on my legs and knees. Blades on my back and tail. Blades on my head. I was a walking armoury. I could cut anything with the slash of my arm, if I wanted to.

I'd been on the receiving end of those slashes too many times to count.

Things smelled different. Not in the wolf way, where the sense of smell was insanely good and able to pick up information that no human would consider, but basically the same sense as a human's. Things smelled _different_. Grass didn't smell like bark. Humans did smell like andalites. I was sensing different chemicals, I supposed. Chemicals that hork-bajir needed to know about.

Vision was different, too. Ax looked more grey than blue. Jake's tiger orange was more vividly yellow than it was to my human or bird eyes. But green... there were dozens of shades of green that no human would be able to tell apart. Highlights of very pale green usually masked by the blue in Ax's fur. Threads of green through brown and grey in the trunks of trees. The leaves of trees were a rainbow of color to hork-bajir eyes, standing vividly out against each other in various shades.

I turned around, glancing about for anything else different. There was a hork-bajir behind me.

"HeeeeRRRROOOOOWW!" Rachel bellowed in a voice that made the leaves quake.

"HeeeeRRRROOOOWWW-Unh!" I responded.

<Shut up, you idiots!> Marco cried frantically. <We're halfway surrounded by yeerks!>

SSSEEEWW! Rachel slashed viciously at the air, missing my gut by about the width of a human finger. I responded by stabbing viciously forward with one knee, almost grazing her hip.

I'd been prepared for something like this. Under normal circumstances, I'd have been able to control it. Dominance battles are very common, especially ritualised ones designed to establish a pecking order without seriously risking injury, and had we been wolves or meerkats, I could've crushed the urge and moved on.

But the method, the motivation, of the hork-bajir ritual had caught me completely off guard. I'd been prepared for threats and posturing, for shouting and wrestling. That stuff was normal, at least for animals on Earth. We weren't doing that. To the other Animorphs, it probably looked like a fight, with our bladed limbs swinging everywhere. But to the hork-bajir mind, it wasn't a simulation of violence.

It was a dance.

I swung my elbow past Rachel's eyes without any aggression, saying, _look at my skill and grace_. She didn't flinch, but responded with a tail swing, saying _I trust your competence. Now look at mine_.

I'd been prepared for a dominance fight, but I hadn't been prepared for a bonding ritual.

<Back off!> Jake yelled. <Stop it!> He snarled, clearly ready to jump between us. Rachel and I quickly got hold of ourselves.

<It's alright, Jake,> I said quickly, crushing the urge to kick out at Rachel with one of my big, sharp feet.

<Yeah,> Rachel said. <We got it now.>

We could hear the heavy footsteps of Controllers marching through the brush. There was no more time to waste.

<Right,> Jake said. <Rachel, do your thing. Cassie, don't get spotted unless you need to be. Tobias, Ax, you know the forest best – get Jara Hamee out of here as soon as it's safe to move him. Marco, you and I are backup.>

Rachel nodded her big birdlike head and disappeared into the forest. Tobias and Ax guided Jara Hamee in the opposite direction.

My job was a lot safer than Rachel's, but it was also somewhat tricky. How was I supposed to keep an eye on her without being seen? I thought through what I knew about hork-bajir. Their eyesight wasn't great – not terrible, but not great – but their senses of smell and hearing were. Well, even if they smelled me, I smelled just like Rachel. They had no reason to think there were two of us. I just needed to stay quiet and out of sight.

There were humans too, though, and humans had pretty good eyesight. How did I evade humans and hork-bajir at the same time, while staying close?

As a human myself, it wasn't easy for me to see human flaws. But my dad and I had had to search the forest before, for injured animals that moved before we could get there. He'd taught me how to do it properly. So while I couldn't be certain about human-Controllers, I did know that untrained humans had one major flaw.

Humans always forgot to look up.

I gazed at the rainbow canopy above. Could hork-bajir climb?

I grabbed a branch and swung myself upward, feeling that same rush of ancient comfort that a human does getting into a tree. Turns out hork-bajir can climb pretty well. Not as well as a monkey, but better than a human. The hork-bajir mind had no fear of the height; I climbed higher and began to move forward.

I wasn't as agile in the trees, or as fast, but I could see Rachel zooming along the ground. I was able to take a straighter path than her, leaping from tree to tree, so with some effort I could sort of keep up. I was going to lose her eventually though, or be forced to drop. I zoomed after her as quickly as I could.

I lost sight of Jake and Marco almost immediately. A tiger in trees is practically invisible even to a human, and a gorilla was a vague blob of slightly greenish nothing to hork-bajir vision. Hork-bajir didn't seem to be all that good at black. The brain just kind of dismissed it as irrelevant.

Rachel, though, was intentionally making noise and tracks, and was therefore relatively easy to keep track of. The Controllers were making no secret of their position either; I couldn't see them through the trees, but I could certainly hear them. They'd noticed Rachel and were closing in. Any second, they were going to get a clear enough view of her to start firing. And hopefully not set the forest on fire when they did.

It was getting hard to keep up with Rachel from the trees. I had to freeze when a small group of Controllers, both humans and hork-bajir, passed directly beneath me. In theory, I could drop down, attack, draw them away from Rachel. But that wasn't the plan. I let them pass.

<Tobias,> Ax said in my head, somewhat distressed. <Does anybody see Tobias?>

<What happened to Tobias?> Rachel asked, looping around in a circle and dashing past me in an attempt to get some distance on her pursuers without losing them entirely.

<I do not know. I cannot find him.>

<Tobias? Are you okay?> I asked.

No answer.

<Ax, stay on mission,> Jake commanded. <Marco, get in the air, try to find Tobias. It's getting dark and it's not really safe for him. I'll back up Rachel and Cassie.>

The yeerks had started firing at Rachel. A beam of light lanced through the trees and struck her thigh. Suddenly, she couldn't run all that well.

<Looks like a fight,> Jake said, although I still couldn't see him. <Get ready.>

Three of us against a squad of armed Controllers, one of us injured and two in unfamiliar morphs? No thanks.

<Rachel, get in the undergrowth and stay still,> I said, dropping from the trees and dashing for the Controllers. I didn't need to lead them far. Just away from Rachel, and away from Jara Hamee.

“HROOOOOOOOW!” I bellowed as I emerged from the trees and slammed straight into a human-Controller, careful not to hit her with my blades. She flew back and slammed into two more, knocking all three over. By the time the Controllers had reacted, I was gone.

I didn't know the forest like Tobias or Ax. But I'd scouted the general area before, and I could smell water running over mud and stone. I knew we were very close to the river. I headed straight for it, careful to make enough noise to be easily tracked, but working to put some distance between myself and the Controllers. I needed to be out of their sight when I actually _got_ to the river.

The fact that several of them were hork-bajir with a lot more practice at using a hork-bajir body than me wasn't helping.

I dashed headlong for the river, not bothering to look behind me. They weren't firing, which suggested they didn't have a clear shot. I put one foot firmly in the mud on the riverbank and then leapt up, up into the trees. I scrambled for height until the first Controllers showed up, and then froze.

It was getting dark. Humans could still sort of see, but my hork-bajir sight couldn't pick out much. The rainbow of leaves around me had become a muted, grey-brown blanket. The Controllers below me were vague, blurred shapes.

That was good. That meant that the hork-bajir-Controllers probably couldn't see me. I just had to hope that, in the chaos of the run and their teammates and the smell of the river water on plant roots, they didn't know what Jara Hamee smelled like. I had no idea whether hork-bajir could distinguish individuals via smell, or if they could, how close they needed to be. I hadn't exactly had the opportunity to experiment.

Human-Controllers started to pull out torches. Their beams swept wide arcs at ground level. I stayed very still, giving them no reason to look up. Somebody spotted the footprint I'd left at the river's edge, and they immediately split into teams, moving either way along the riverbank. Somebody started talking urgently into a radio.

Of course, if it had've been a human footprint, it wouldn't have fooled them for a second. Nobody sees a human footprint at the edge of a river and thinks 'oh, they must be in the river'; they double back and start looking for where they actually went after trying to lead their pursuers to the river. But hork-bajir had never seemed big on evasion when we fought them, and when I prodded the instinctive mind of my morph, it didn't have much in the way of tricks or feints to offer. Hopefully, the Controllers wouldn't expect a human trick from a fleeing hork-bajir.

I waited until the Controllers had moved on before demorphing. Then I went owl, and I went to find the others.


	5. Chapter 5

By the time I found the group, all settled about a new cave, they'd found Tobias. Or, more accurately, Tobias had shown up with a second hork-bajir, who he introduced as Ket Halpak, Jara Hamee's wife.

The hork-bajir were really cute together. Ket touched the healing wounds on Jara's head and muttered something in their guttural tongue. They dipped their heads and touched their forehead-blades gently together. I couldn't stay and watch them, though; I needed to get home. It was hard to fight aliens while grounded.

Rachel seemed to be thinking the same thing. <Look, we have to get out of here. I'll be grounded for the weekend if I don't get home. And I have the feeling we're going to be busy this weekend, so I can't get grounded.>

<Your mom wouldn't ground a Packard Foundation Outstanding Student, would she?> Tobias asked brightly.

There was a kind of embarrassed silence. How had Tobias found out? It wasn't really a _secret_ , but...

<It's not that big a deal,> Rachel said. She looked down at the ground.

<What do we do about these guys?> Jake asked. He was still in tiger morph. There were scratches and cuts on his sinuous orange-and-black hide. Somewhere in the chase, he must've slowed down some of the Controllers pursuing Rachel or me.

<You guys go on home,> Tobias said. <I'll keep watch over our hork-bajir friends here.>

<You can't keep watch all night,> Rachel protested.

<Hey, I have nothing else to do. I'll take a perch in the tree by the cave entrance. Not a problem.>

<I will help keep watch, too,> Ax chimed in.

Jake said to the hork-bajir, <Jara and Ket? You have to stay in this cave till we come and get you. Tomorrow some time.>

"What will you do with Ket Halpak and Jara Hamee?" Jara asked.

<We really don't know yet,> Jake answered honestly.

"We will wait. Here."

"We _fellana_ ... we thank you," Ket said.

It was very definitely dark outside. That didn't bother me much – owls could see very well in starlight – but it was definitely getting time to go home. Everyone but Tobias and Ax got into their owl morphs, and we took off, not really caring if we looked strange flying so close together. We were owls. It was dark. Who was going to be looking?

<So,> Marco said, when it became clear that nobody else was going to ask. <What are we doing with the hork-bajir?>

<We could take them to the media,> Rachel suggested. <How can you deny there is a yeerk conspiracy when you see those two?>

<That kind of runs us right into the Ax problem,> I pointed out. <If we take a pair of aliens to the government, they'll probably just lock them up for tests or something. And somehow I don't think hork-bajir are going to be able to handle themselves half as well as an andalite when it comes to human authorities. We're trying to rescue these guys, remember?>

<We send photos, then,> she amended.

<Sure, and then we tell them we saw bigfoot,> Marco said. <Nobody believes those photos, or the newspapers that publish them. Besides, we don't know what is and isn't infiltrated by yeerks. We could just bring the yeerks right to us.>

<We're looking at this wrong,> I said. <These are the only two free hork-bajir on Earth. They're an endangered species, you might say.>

<Oh, man,> Marco groaned. <Cassie, don't start with the ecology stuff, okay? Those aren't a pair of spotted owls of humpback whales back there.>

<Aren't they?> I asked. <I mean, sure, this isn't their natural home, but we don't exactly have the means to get them there, do we? And even if we did, it's in yeerk hands. What we have is what could very well be the only two free hork-bajir in the galaxy, so they're a great deal more endangered than spotted owls.>

<Okay,> Jake said. <What do we do with an endangered species?>

<We find them a nice, secluded environment and hope they make lots of little hork-bajir,> I said. A single breeding pair wasn't exactly a stable gene pool, but that was a problem for later.

<Where are we supposed to find a place that's safe for an alien species that looks like a cross between a gargoyle and a lawn mower?> Marco asked.

<I don't know,> I said. <I really don't know.>


	6. Chapter 6

<I know a place,> Tobias said.

It was 6am the next morning. We'd all gone to see Tobias, Ax and the hork-bajir before school, because we apparently all hated sleep. The hork-bajir, apparently more sensible than us, were still sleeping in the cave.

<You know a place where the hork-bajir can live in safety?> Marco asked, not trying to hide the doubt in his voice. He was in osprey morph. None of us wanted to demorph, and risk being spotted by a hork-bajir peering out of the cave at the wrong time.

<Yes. Up in the mountains. There's a little secluded valley, with a stream and plenty of caves. It's difficult to see unless you're directly above it.>

<You've been scouting the mountains?> I asked. I knew that Tobias spent most of his time scouting yeerk-based enterprises for us. It wouldn't have surprised me if he was trying to keep tabs on their supply ships or whatever. Of course, last time we'd attacked one of those, we'd all nearly died.

<Actually, I've never seen it before. I just know it's there.>

There was several moments of silence as we all contemplated that.

<So,> I said finally, <are we going to talk about this? Randomly having new information and being places you aren't intending to be? I'm guessing you didn't just happen to wander off and find Ket yesterday.>

<I didn't,> he said reluctantly. <I kind of just... found myself in the right place.>

I mentally checked off the list of possibilities. Clearly not just insanity; the information he was getting was far too useful for random delusions. Not an alien distress signal, unless hork-bajir were secretly telepathic. Didn't seem like time travel this time. It was too specific to our present situation to be residual information from all that stuff Elfangor had dumped into his brain in the construction site. Must be something new.

<And you haven't wondered about why that's happening?> I pressed.

<I've been a little busy trying to keep a pair of aliens out of yeerk hands,> Tobias pointed out.

I didn't press the issue. I wanted to, but I'd started enough arguments with enough teammates in the past month or so. But somehow, the thought that Tobias didn't seem to care that weird things were happening to his mind was more concerning than whatever was happening. Tobias wasn't an apathetic person. I knew he was bothered that he couldn't go on all the missions. I knew he spent as much time as he could advancing the cause by spying on Controllers, finding yeerk pool entrances, keeping people safe. The concept that he wouldn't at least be curious about such a thing made absolutely no sense. Tobias was curious by nature. Humans were curious by nature.

Red-tailed hawks weren't.

I pushed the disturbing thought aside. He was probably just preoccupied with the two hork-bajir, like he'd said. There was probably nothing to worry about. Probably.

<Any problems with the hork-bajir?> Jake asked.

<Nope. They just stayed in their cave all night and talked. Mostly in English, with a few of their own words.>

<Why do they speak English?> I asked. <To communicated better with human-Controllers?>

<Perhaps,> Ax said. <The hork-bajir language is very primitive. They were never a very intellectual species. Their language only has about five hundred words, which may be difficult for explaining complex concepts.>

It seemed odd to me that a species with such a limited language would be able to easily adapt to a less limited language. If they had minds capable of that, wouldn't their own language be more complex? It gave me hope, though. If hork-bajir could learn English despite it being alien to them, then perhaps I could learn the andalite language.

<They kept using this one word, over and over. _Kawatnoj_. Do you know what it means, Ax? >

<No. I do not speak hork-bajir.>

<Don't you speak everything?> I asked. <I thought you had a translator chip thing.>

<A translator must be programmed. The hork-bajir did not have even radio transmissions before the yeerks conquered them. Any hork-bajir correspondence we have is limited to hork-bajir speaking directly with andalites. I doubt that more than a few vital words would have been programmed into our translator system. But I will ask them what it means when they wake.>

<Maybe you shouldn't,> Jake said. <They don't seem to like andalites. Any idea why?>

Ax shook his head. <We tried to save them from the yeerks,> he said with sudden anger. <We failed, yes. But we did try. Why should they hate us?>

<I don't know, Ax-man,> Tobias said. <Maybe they've had yeerks in their heads for so long they've just absorbed the yeerk hatred of andalites.>

<Well. The yeerks should hate us. We andalites will defeat them in the end! And of course, you humans will help, too.>

I laughed silently. Andalite arrogance was just one of those quirks we had to get used to. We probably did a lot of things that Ax found annoying, too.

<Tobias, do you need help leading these yeerks to this valley you mentioned?> Jake asked. <We need to get to – >

<Taxxons!> Tobias said suddenly, looking ready to take to the air.

<What?> Jake asked.

<Taxxons, coming this way. I don't know how I know. But they are. They're following the hork-bajir scent, somehow. I didn't know they could do that.>

<Taxxon trackers can,> Ax said. <They can follow warm flesh for miles. If they have trackers here... we may have a problem.>

<Oh, good,> Marco said. <We were running low on those.>

<Tobias, get the hork-bajir out of here,> Jake said. <Everyone else, battle morphs. We're going taxxon hunting.> We all flew some distance from the cave, where we could demorph out of sight.

<They will have hork-bajir and humans backing the taxxons up,> Ax warned. <No number of taxxons would stand a chance against a pair of desperate hork-bajir.>

<Doesn't matter. If we take out the taxxons, they can't follow Jara and Ket. Try to avoid the other Controllers if you can, we don't need a bloodbath.>

<We're going to be late for school, aren't we?> Marco moaned, already half-demorphed. <I wonder if Visser Three will write me a note.>

I felt the last of my feathers melt away, and paused. Normally, I'd focus on the wolf, and let my hair thicken into shaggy fur and my teeth elongate. It was definitely the morph I'd had the most combat experience with. But we were facing taxxons this time, and against taxxons, it probably paid to be made of knives.

Jara Hamee had given fairly emphatic permission to use his form in the fight. _'Jara Hamee hates yeerks.'_ I focused on hork-bajir instead.

Again, I grew. Again, blades emerged from my flesh. My muscles thickened, my tail emerged. Soon, I was a huge, bladed warrior alien, ready to play tag with some giant caterpillars.

And as a bonus, my smell should confuse them and possibly buy the real hork-bajir a little more time if we should fail.

Rachel stood up on her hind legs and shook her shaggy bear bulk. She mentally laughed in approval when she saw me, then dropped back down, ready to charge. <Let's kick some yeerk butt.>

<Tobias,> Jake said, <which direction were these taxxons?>

<Southwest,> Tobias said. <The hork-bajir and me are setting out now.>

<Right. Let's go, everyone.>

<Have a fun picnic, Tobias!> Marco called. <We'll catch up after school, okay?>

<You can't see me, but I'm rolling my eyes at you right now,> Tobias responded.

<Can hawks even do that?>

I raised my head to the wind and took a deep breath, immediately missing my wolf sense of smell. A wolf would be able to smell the taxxons, any nearby hork-bajir or humans, and know about how far away they were and quite possibly whether or not they were scared or angry. All my hork-bajir nose told me was that I was standing in a forest.

Great sensory input there.

I moved Southwest, keeping to the ground so that I could be sure the taxxons would smell me. Somewhere to my left were Jake and Marco. To my right was Rachel. Ax, who hadn't needed to morph, had dashed out ahead, andalite hooves leaving gouges in the tops of exposed tree roots.

We found the taxxon trackers soon enough. Dozens of them, moving carefully along the ground, pausing only to snap up and swallow whatever got in their way. Why dozens, when one or two would do? They must have been expecting losses.

Jake didn't bother giving the order. As soon as the fighting started, we knew; taxxon screeches and animal bellows reverberated through the forest, and the air smelled acidic with alien blood.

I slashed out with one arm, laying a taxxon's side open, then got out of the way so that his compatriots could finish him off. Another taxxon rushed for him. I kicked a hole into that one.

A tiger, with vicious jaws and even more vicious claws. An andalite, tail moving like a blur. A huge, angry bear. A big, strong gorilla. An alien that was basically a walking, upright lawn mower. Against a bunch of completely unprepared taxxons, who didn't even seem to be carrying Dracon beams.

This wasn't a battle. It was a slaughter.

At least, it was at first. More gaping, hungry maws came for me, more hunger-mad taxxons climbing over their wounded compatriots and leaping for hork-bajir flesh. They were showing a lot of self-control for taxxon-Controllers, ignoring the wounded to come for me. That thought made me hesitate, which almost cost me an arm. I hadn't been seriously injured in the battle yet, but they were coming straight for me. They were paying little attention to the other Animorphs, except to try to defend themselves.

<Cassie,> Ax pointed out, <they are tracking your scent.>

<Then let's finish cutting them up before they can take a bite,> Rachel reasoned.

<We have hork-bajir circling around,> Marco reported, <too many for me to deal with. If they see their prey all busy cutting up taxxons...>

<Cassie, get out of here, try to lead them away from Ket and Jara,> Jake ordered. <Everyone else, let's try to finish off these trackers and get out.>

I turned and ran. I wasn't overly familiar with that part of the forest, but some hork-bajir sense told me I was heading South. Tight, powerful muscles pulled me between the trees at great speed, but hork-bajir weren't natural long-distance runners and I quickly tired. If I were a wolf, I could've kept running until I needed to demorph. It was somewhat ironic that _this_ was the mission a wolf's natural endurance would have been so handy for, when I would've gladly traded such a thing for so many blades in previous battles.

Had I successfully fled? Had the hork-bajir-Controllers noticed that 'Jara Hamee' had been in the battle? Leaning against a tree and dragging air into alien lungs, I prodded the hork-bajir mind for insight. High on adrenalin as I was, there didn't seem to be any instinctive panic or fear of pursuit. The hork-bajir mind wasn't trying to be particularly alert, or pushing me to run. Apparently it 'thought' I was safe. I demorphed as soon as I was able and morphed osprey, checked in with the others (still cleaning up the last of the trackers) and went to find Tobias.

Here's a curious thing – a hork-bajir body, despite being an alien from an entirely separate evolutionary tree, is in some ways more familiar than the body of an everyday osprey. Sure, the colour vision was strange, but so was a bird's – I was flying under what looked like a magenta sky, for pity's sake. But hork-bajir have, for example, lungs that breathe in and out much like a human's. A bird's lungs are one-way, pushing the air on a set path that doesn't reverse. A human or a hork-bajir pulls air in and then breathes it out the same way, reversing the direction of the air flow.

In other ways, of course, they're entirely different. A bird and a human have basically the same bone structure, although the muscle attachment is a bit different and a bird's bones are of course mostly hollow. A hork-bajir has a very different bone structure that approximates the same function as a human's, at least as far as I could tell from morphing one. But when you're swinging your limbs around, you don't really think about bone structure, so it felt a lot more familiar. It made being the ordinary Earth bird feel weird.

I found Tobias leading the hork-bajir towards the mountain. They were easy to spot from the air, with osprey eyes. He had to move at hork-bajir pace, so it wasn't all that hard to catch up.

<Hey, Tobias,> I greeted him from some distance away, so as not to startle him.

<Cassie. How goes the battle?>

<They'll catch up with us soon, provided they can evade the hork-bajir. I came to see if you needed any help.>

<Nope. Just being a helpful little birdy guide. No problems.>

<So,> I said. <About where you're getting all this weird information from.>

<Oh, that. Don't worry. I've resolved that.>

<Really? How?>

<I had a little chat with our old friend the ellimist.>

<You mean the andalite trickster gods? One of those ellimists?>

<I don't think the andalites see them as gods, exactly, but yes.>

<Do you ever get tired of being an interstellar radio tower?>

<I am confident that someday, I will meet an alien who will not see my brain as an information dumping site. Maybe these hork-bajir. They don't look all that tech savvy.> He dropped and landed on a branch. <Are you two okay?>

The hork-bajir didn't seem to be moving all that fast, I realised. But they didn't complain.

“Ket Halpak and Jara Hamee can keep walking,” Ket Halpak grunted. “Will be free.” She had a chest wound, I noticed. It was sealed, but if Jara Hamee's healing head was any indication, it was very fresh.

<Are you hungry?> Tobias pressed. <Do you need to eat?>

The two exchanged glances.

“We eat,” Jara Hamee agreed. He stopped walking and lashed out an arm, gouging his elbow-blade into a tree. It left a deep slash. With a forearm blade, he sliced down from the slash, shaving a long strip of bark from the tree. Ket Halpak was similarly stripping bark from another tree. They both sat on the ground, leaning partially against each other for support, and began to eat.

<That's what you eat?> Tobias asked, sounding somewhat perplexed. <Bark?>

Ket grunted in a way that sounded affirmative without pausing.

<Is that how you eat on your home world?>

“When Jara Hamee small,” the hork-bajir replied, “Jara Hamee eat from the _Kanver_. Eat from the _Lewhak_. Eat from the _Tali Fit Fit_."

<Are those all trees? I mean, are they like these trees?> Tobias asked.

"Better," Ket Halpak said.

"Better," Jara Hamee agreed. After a moment, he hurriedly added, “Earth tree good.” As if he was worried he'd offended us by putting down Earth trees or something.

“Earth tree good,” Ket Halpak agreed.

<That's what the blades are for,> I said, understanding. <Stripping bark. Each has a special use, for harvesting bark.>

The hork-bajir didn't bother to answer. I guess what I'd said had been pretty obvious. And yet it had never occurred to me. I knew of all sorts of animals with big teeth for eating nuts or sharp spines that helped them hide. And yet, whenever I looked at a hork-bajir, I had thought _weapon_.

Why? Probably because those blades had been turned on me so many times. Because the yeerks had seen them, and also thought _weapon_ , and climbed their way into hork-bajir heads and turned them into exactly that.

I watched Ket Halpak strip another piece of bark and share it with her husband. I remembered taxxon guts on my own arm blades, the acrid smell of death in the air, taxxon blood making the ground slippery beneath my feet.

If I'd had a human stomach, I would've been sick.

<I need to eat, too,> Tobias said.

Ket Halpak held out some bark. “Our food yours.”

<Not that. I need... different food. I'll be back soon. Listen to my friend here while I'm gone, okay?> He took off over the forest, to find something small and kill it.

The others showed up shortly after. They'd had to circle around so as not to lead any Controllers to the pair of hork-bajir. The forest was still full of enemies, but they didn't have any trackers left; at least, not in the immediate vicinity. The Animorphs had made sure of that.

I filled them in on the ellimist situation (which Ax wasn't remotely happy about), as well as why the hork-bajir were mutilating trees. Once the hork-bajir were sufficiently fed, we started moving back up the mountain. Tobias would be able to catch up with us easily, and we wanted to get the hork-bajir as close to safety as possible before we had to go to school.

Which was ludicrous. The only two free members of an alien species were in grave danger. We had to defend them from alien invaders, but we couldn't, because instead we needed to go to a building full of other kids and memorise pointless rubbish with them that wasn't going to be remotely helpful in our lives, because on the remote chance that any of us actually made it through the war I was pretty sure no employer would be looking at our grades. And we had to do it, even though it was pointless and stupid and could get the two hork-bajir killed, because if we didn't maintain our cover then the yeerks might be able to figure out who we were.

Tobias returned, jumpy and irritable. I supposed that he hadn't been able to find any breakfast. And here I was, annoyed at having to go sit in a nice, safe building for a few hours before getting handed food on a tray.

Of course, the fact that Tobias was worse off than us didn't solve the problem. We had to demorph. We had to get to school. We had to escort these walking razor blades up a mountain without getting them killed or captured.

We left Tobias and Ax alone with the pair, and went to school. Hopefully, they'd be able to protect the hork-bajir on their own for six hours. Hopefully.

And then what? We wait for more trackers? For new technology to be brought in? We wait and see what the yeerks had, and we break it, and we keep breaking it forever? A wolf could follow the hork-bajir to their new valley by smell alone. The yeerks should be able to do it without a problem. How exactly were we supposed to get them there safe? To keep them safe? Kill every yeerk that tried to get close?

We couldn't keep that up indefinitely. There was the chance that we could keep going until the yeerks gave up, that we could make their acquisition too 'expensive' in terms of lives, but the very concept was sickening. Straight-out murder as a deterrent? Not if we had a choice. The humans we faced were just like Tom. The hork-bajir we faced were just like Jara and Ket. This had always been a war paid for in innocent lives, but that didn't mean we should go straight to deliberate, active slaughter.

I thought about the taxxons I'd killed that morning, and wanted to be sick again. They might be giant, nearly-mindless caterpillars intent on eating everything in sight, but... actually, I realised, I didn't know anything about taxxons. They all had yeerks in their heads. The beasts I faced in battle were no more representative of their species than the hork-bajir who'd tried to take my head off in battle were.

That wasn't a pleasant thought. But I didn't let myself shy away from it. I couldn't. _We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night_. Unpleasant truth was still truth.

Alien lives were still lives.

No, we had to find a way other than reckless slaughter. To keep doing what we were doing in the face of all logic and reason was immoral and impractical. We were barely holding together in the war at large, we couldn't add 'protectors of a pair of hork-bajir' to the list of job titles.

We couldn't talk about it at school, of course, not even during lunch. There are some places you don't want to say the word 'hork-bajir', and a school that acted as a hotspot and recruitment centre for the yeerks was one of them. It was a nervous six hours, eyes on the clock, waiting to dash back out into the forest. Terrified of what could have happened while we were gone.

We got out as soon as we could, grew wings, and headed for the forest.

We had been right to worry.


	7. Chapter 7

We saw the danger before we heard it. Helicopters, criss-crossing the forest in a search pattern.

They could be a problem. Helicopters didn't weaken, they had an excellent view of the forest, and unlike most of the Controllers they'd sent, they could be explained away if spotted by hikers. Unlike our hork-bajir.

Not wanting to be seen and shot out of the sky, we dropped beneath the trees and morphed wolves instead. I'd had plenty of practice smelling hork-bajir as a wolf, so once we found the cave it was no trouble to track Jara Hamee and Ket Halpak up the mountain. Eventually, we found a rocky overhang sheltering two hork-bajir and an andalite. A red-tailed hawk perched on a nearby branch.

We greeted the group and then trotted up, four little wolves, to hide under the overhang ourselves. <Jake,> I said privately, <we might have a problem. I know we've not been in morph nearly two hours, but we're not going to get out of helicopter range before...>

<I know what you mean.> His tone changed as he looped the rest of the Animorphs into the conversation. <Guys, we need to demorph out of sight of those helicopters soon. Unless Tobias knows of another handy cave or overhang...>

<Sorry, Jake. This isn't my part of the forest.>

We all glanced at the two hork-bajir, uncertainly holding hands and peering up at the rock above as a helicopter passed noisily overhead.

<Look,> I said, <we can't stay here forever anyway. And if we all walk out from under here as wolves, that helicopter will probably spot us. These guys are better than the yeerks, right?>

<I hate to go all CIA on you guys,> Marco said, <but if these two see us, they can't ever be recaptured by the yeerks. I mean – >

<We know what you mean,> Tobias snapped. He seemed really on edge. I couldn't blame him. Frankly I thought the hork-bajir deserved an indication of our full commitment to their freedom. But it wasn't just my secret.

<We either need to do this, or come up with a plan right now,> Rachel said, a hint of worry in her voice.

<What are our chances of success here, though? Freeing these hork-bajir?> Marco asked. <I mean, we're kind of succeeding on luck so far. We can't keep this up. If we do this, there's no going back. We succeed or they die.>

<We'll succeed,> Tobias said with uncharacteristic force.

<We'll try, but realistically – >

<If you think you're helping, Marco, you're wrong.>

<Tobias,> Ax said with surprising gentleness, <if you are counting on that ellimist's assistance, you should remember that – >

<He won't help. I know he won't help. This depends on our choices. My choices.> Tobias preened a wing. He does that when something is bothering him.

<Some choice,> Rachel grumbled. <He starts moving you about the place and puts the fate of a species on your shoulders...>

<He said he'd... you know. Make me human again. If I did this.>

For about thirty seconds, nobody said or did anything.

Then Rachel crept farther under the overhang, and began to grow.

<Jara, Ket,> Tobias said hurriedly as the rest of us started to demorph, <I need to know something. If the yeerks recapture you...>

Jara Hamee slashed the air viciously with one arm. Then he pointed at his head, at the scar he'd made. “No more yeerk here. Jara Hamee free. Free! Or no Jara Hamee. No Ket Halpak.”

Ket Halpak pointed at the wound on her chest. “Yeerks take one heart,” she said forcefully. “Free, or yeerks take other heart. Not take Ket Halpak. Not take Jara Hamee.”

“Free or dead,” Jara Hamee said harshly.

“Free or dead,” Ket Halpak repeated.

“I can see why you like these guys,” Rachel said as the last of her fur melted away. She stood on her bare human feet, looked up at the sky (or at least, the stone hiding the sky) and bellowed, “Free or dead!”

The two aliens looked at her. Then they looked at the rest of us, wolf features slowly melting to human. Then at each other.

I'd heard hork-bajir laugh before, normally in support of something horrible Visser Three had just said or done. I'd never heard them do so so exuberantly. Ket leaned heavily on Jara, unable to draw enough breath between bouts of huffing laughter. Jara himself leaned on the wall of stone.

“Human folk!” Ket Halpak was eventually able to gasp.

Jara Hamee peered at Tobias. “You human folk?”

<Not at the moment,> Tobias said. <I used to be. I changed.>

“Jara Hamee change too,” he replied. “Not free. Now free.” He looked at Rachel, then threw back his head and shouted “Free or dead!”

“Free or dead!” Rachel shouted back.

“I don't know how much those pilots can hear over the sounds of their helicopters, but maybe we should be a bit quieter,” Marco said nervously.

Rachel grabbed Marco's shoulders and gave him a hard shake. “Say it, you dummy – free or dead!”

“Yeah, yeah, free or dead,” he muttered. Then he laughed. “You do realise you're insane, right?”

“Yeah, but she's a Packard Foundation Outstanding Student who's insane,” I pointed out.

“I'm sure the yeerks will be impressed,” Marco said mildly.

“So what are we going to do about all these helicopters?” Jake asked. “Does anybody have a helicopter-killing morph?” He said it jokingly, but everybody still glanced at me as if half-hoping I'd tell them about some obscure animal ability. I shook my head.

“Even if we had a way to bring down the helicopters, it's not a good idea to do so in the forest. Besides, it wouldn't help. Taxxons this morning, helicopters this afternoon, probably Bug fighters at midnight. We're not going to be able to stop them.”

“They really, really want these hork-bajir,” Marco said, shaking his head. “Surely they've lost more than two hork-bajir-worth of troops already.”

“It's called the Sunk Cost Fallacy,” I said. “If you put too many resources into something, you start to overvalue that thing to justify the expense, because pulling out would 'waste' all the resources you've spent so far. If our plan is to make these hork-bajir expensive – and personally I'd like to try for a less murderous plan for once – then we're going to have to make them _really_ expensive to counteract that.”

Tobias looked hard at me. It's not really possible for a hawk to have any other look, but I got the feeling he was doing it on purpose.

<I'm going to do a quick search for ground troops,> he said.

“Be careful,” Jake warned. “They know to look for a red-tailed hawk.”

<I know.> Tobias took off, flapping hard to remain airborne under the treeline.

Ax stood tense under the overhang. The two hork-bajir looked worried, and held each other tightly. Us four humans slouched back against the rock.

I watched Jake. Our 'fearless leader' wasn't looking so fearless. He looked tired, and worried. He glanced at the hork-bajir, then at me, then unconsciously clenched his fist. He'd become quite reluctant to touch me since I told him about my Temrash flashbacks. On the one hand, it was sort of nice to not constantly find myself back at that table, but on the other, I hated to think that I was making him uncomfortable. I wished I'd never said anything.

“Alright,” he said, as if reluctant to initiate what was certain to be a pointless conversation. “Ideas? How do we stop the yeerks from tracking these two?”

“We could mask their scent somehow,” Marco suggested.

“How?” I asked. “I mean, we could hide it under something like skunk musk, but that would just make them easier to track. We can't exactly march them up the mountain standing only in rivers.”

“And it doesn't solve our helicopter problem, I guess,” Marco added with a shrug. “If they could just morph, we'd have no problem.”

“There are ways to solve problems without morphing, Marco,” Rachel said sharply. I looked at her in surprise. She shot me a glare in response. Of course, she was still mad at me.

There was a hopeless kind of pause, where everybody waited patiently for somebody else to have an idea.

Nobody else seemed willing to ask the question, so I did. “Do you guys think the ellimist will really make Tobias human again?”

<Unlikely,> Ax said. <Ellimists speak in riddles. They almost never do what they claim.>

Well, that was depressing.

Tobias blew back under the overhang a little while later. He fixed his fierce gaze on us, one by one.

<We have a problem,> he said.


	8. Chapter 8

Helicopters to the North. Troops to the East and West. Marco drew a small, hurried map in the ground as Tobias described the situation.

<The helicopters have Dracon beams,> he explained. <They were firing at the ground. I didn't stick around to see the results, but...>

“Fires,” I whispered. “They'll be starting bushfires.” They hadn't tried to start fires to find us. Maybe our attempts to keep the public eye on the forest had helped. Maybe they'd just figured it was too close to civilisation. But they seemed to have no problem doing it in the mountains. Fires, taxxons in broad daylight... they were putting a lot more effort into finding the two rogue hork-bajir that they'd ever put into finding us.

It was a little bit insulting, to be honest. I mean, we'd had _some_ effect. We'd caused problems for them.

“It's a trap,” Marco muttered. “They’re trying to herd them. What's to the South?”

<A cheer cliff face,> Tobias said.

“Can we evade them?” Jake asked.

<Yes, if we move now. But I don't think we should.>

<You think we should let ourselves be trapped?> Ax asked.

<Yes. These hork-bajir are valuable to the yeerks, really valuable. And I don't think they've overestimated their value. I don’t think it’s this sunk cost thing.>

I glanced at Jara and Ket. “You think what, then? They have knowledge that the yeerks can't let them escape with?”

<I don't know. Maybe. I do know that they represent something incredibly dangerous.>

“What?”

<Hope. The yeerk conquest relies on their hosts having no hope. If these two run, and escape? Others are going to try. Others are going to rebel. Even if only a fraction make it, the yeerks have a real problem on their hands. This is a good thing for us, it means our goals and the yeerks' goals don't actually conflict. We want to keep this pair alive and free. They want to crush hope.>

I nodded, understanding. “They either need to bring them back, or make sure they die, preferably at the hands of one of their friends. Thus all the hork-bajir in daylight. What should we do?”

<We give them what they want.>

“You want us to give up these two?” Marco asked.

<No. Like I said, their goal isn't about recapturing Jara and Ket. It's about making sure – at least in the eyes of their hosts – that they don't escape alive.>

He explained the plan. It was a good plan. It was also an extremely dangerous plan, especially for the two of us who would play hork-bajir.

Rachel immediately called dibs on Jara Hamee. I didn't fight her for it. It meant that we still needed somebody to play Ket, though.

“I'll do it,” Jake said.

<No,> Tobias said, <I will.>

We all stood, very confused, for about fifteen seconds. Then, hesitantly, Rachel ventured, “Ellimist?”

<Yes.>

“I thought he was going to make you – ”

<Can we complain about the trickster alien later? We're kind of on a time limit here.> Tobias must have said something private to Ket Halpak, because she thrust up her chin and raised one arm, an invitation. He landed gently on her forearm blade, and for a moment, her eyes fluttered closed.

Tobias then flapped down to the ground. He closed his eyes. Concentrated.

Watching a hawk turn into a hork-bajir is weird. Weirder than watching any of my human friends morph. Weirder than watching Ax even; I was used to that. Tobias grew, and the skin on his legs became brown and leathery. His face changed shape, his beak broadening and softening a little, blades erupting from his head like a crest. Feathers disappeared into his flesh as more blades rose. A tail of flesh instead of feathers shot from the base of his spine.

Tobias lifted his arms, testing the movement of his shoulders. He slashed at the air experimentally. He caught sight of Jara and Ket and froze for a second, fighting his new instincts I supposed.

It occurred to me that I didn't know if Tobias had ever morphed anything but a hawk before. I was a little worried that he mightn't be able to control the instincts, or that he mightn't understand when he should trust the hork-bajir senses and reactions. But he controlled them better than I did. After all, hadn't be been fighting instincts ever since becoming trapped? Hadn't he trusted his hawk body every time he needed to fly or hunt or fight?

He looked at us. Then down at his body.

Jake cleared his throat. “Okay. Let's get in position, everyone. It's time to help some escaping hork-bajir.”


	9. Chapter 9

The plan was quite simple.

The yeerks couldn't allow the hork-bajir to escape. They needed them recaptured or dead. We needed time to get them safe, time for their trail to vanish. We needed them to stop looking, if only for a little while.

From that perspective, it was pretty obvious what we needed to do. Everything from there was just a matter of logistical details.

<Rachel and Tobias are about to initiate contact,> Ax reported from the air. <You have about ten minutes.>

I glanced from Jake, Jara and Ket to the cliff face behind me. Stones and bits of scrub almost completely hid the little cave in which Marco was hiding, nervously, in gorilla morph. If he messed up, the plan would fail, and either Rachel or Tobias would probably be dead. It was a very long, very vicious drop down the cliff.

That was good, in a way. It meant that the details of what we were doing down at the bottom would be harder to make out from the top.

“Alright,” Jake said. “Better morph wolf. You ready?”

“We have to do something first,” I said. I looked up the cliff again. “There has to be no doubt. This can't look fake.”

“I think we can manage to look appropriately vicious and hungry, and our hork-bajir friends should have no trouble lying still.”

“Still isn't good enough. There should be no doubt. We have to do something extreme enough that they wouldn't consider that we'd fake it.”

“Like what?” Jake asked.

I closed my eyes and focused. But I didn't morph into a wolf. I grew. My skin became leathery. The blood in my veins thickened and changed. <Jara Hamee, Ket Halpak, it's time to get in position.>

The hork-bajir didn't ask any questions. They just lay down, splaying their limbs as if having fallen from a cliff. I crouched over Ket, throwing one leg over her body. <This will feel a bit strange, but don't panic or move, okay?>

I inspected my wrist blade in the sunlight. Steeled myself.

Then brought it down and laid open my thigh.

If I had've been human, I would've got an artery. I don't know anything about the hork-bajir circulatory system, but it still seemed to do the trick. Dark red and even darker blue-green liquid spilled from my leg onto Ket's motionless form.

Jake stopped morphing, half-wolf, to stare at me. <Cassie! What are you doing?!>

<Providing realism.> It was difficult not to scream and compromise the mission. Jara Hamee cutting open his own head had given me the impression that hork-bajir must have absurdly high pain tolerance. It seemed that that was wrong. He had simply been brave and desperate. That was okay. I was desperate too. <If they don't look injured, the yeerks will suspect a trap. They need to look hurt enough that nobody would think we could do this on purpose. And we heal much better than they do.> The yeerks knew we could morph, of course, and Visser Three at least would know that we could heal by it. But I was pretty sure he didn't rely on that healing factor nearly as much as we did, and it probably wouldn't occur to him that it was an exploitable resource.

I crawled over to Jara, damaged leg dragging across the ground. The area would be stirred up enough that that wouldn't matter, by the time we were finished. I bled a little over him, too.

Then I put my wrist blade against my belly and slashed horizontally, as if parting bark to strip it from a tree. Something like intestines spilled out. I keened quietly in pain, and fought to keep my voice down. Yeerks would be getting close soon, probably within shouting range.

<Cassie! Stop! You'll kill yourself!>

<I'm fine, Jake,> I lied. I spilled some guts onto Jara's motionless form, separated them from my body with a slash, and demorphed as quickly as I could.

<Are you okay?> Jake nuzzled my human form with his wolf snout.

“Yes. I'm not injured.” If only I could convince my own brain of that, and have it stop replaying the memory of pain. Sometimes, amputees get itches in phantom limbs, sensations that don't go away because part of their brain forgets that there's no limb there to scratch. Morph-healing could be a bit like that sometimes; I remembered I had a huge abdominal wound, and instantly getting rid of it wasn't something that the brain adjusted to very easily. I pushed the feeling away and focused on the wolf inside me. We were running out of time.

And I could feel a creeping fear rising, threatening to drown me. A feeling that wasn't my own, but was very familiar.

Visser Three. Visser Three was nearby.

<Well, well, well. Ket Halpak and Jara Hamee, isn't it?> the Visser's voice announced in my head. I glanced up and about, searching the area just as my colour vision faded into the wolf's more limited palette, but he wasn't there. He must be addressing Rachel and Tobias. If all had gone well, that meant he was up on the cliff. I looked closely and I could just see the end of his tail.

On the one hand, having him see Jara and Ket 'die' was probably a good thing. On the other, this made the plan way more dangerous. He could morph into something horrible and eat Rachel and Tobias as an example. He could block their passage. He could happen to glance over the cliff with a stalk eye, and see us, and blow the whole operation.

Fur crept over my face and down my body.

<You've certainly led us on a merry chase. But it's time to come home now.>

<Visser Three is standing very close to the edge of the ravine,> Ax reported from the air, sounding worried.

<We know,> Jake said. <We can see him.>

<If he should happen to glance down, the plan will fail. Should I distract him?>

Jake thought about that for a second. <No. Better that the yeerks don't know we're involved in this particular trap. Otherwise they'll wonder why we're not all up there fighting them, why we let this happen.>

The Visser shifted, paced along the edge of the cliff. I could see the right side of his body. My hands melted into paws, my teeth grew; I was completely wolf. We were two wolves, waiting patiently beside two 'dead' hork-bajir while their duplicates were surrounded on a cliff edge.

The Visser hadn't finished grandstanding. <You see, there is no escape from the Empire. To try to run is only to get yourselves and your friends hurt. There is nowhere to run. There is no way to outrun us. There – >

The Visser stopped speaking, stopped pacing.

<He's looking at you! He's looking right at you!> Ax reported. I could just make out the Visser's stalk eye over the cliff -- Ax was right. Visser Three saw everything. 

Ax must have spoken privately to us, because Rachel and Tobias continued regardless. 

“Jara Hamee and Ket Halpak free!” Rachel roared in Jara Hamee’s voice.

“Free or dead!” Tobias bellowed in Ket Halpak’s.

Visser Three stayed at the cliff's edge for several seconds, motionless. 

Then, at the last second, he dodged.

A hork-bajir went sailing over the cliff edge, right over the little mostly-concealed cave. A gorilla’s arm shot out and grabbed their arm, pulling them to safety. A few seconds later, a second hork-bajir dropped over, and was similarly rescued.

Controllers, human and hork-bajir, rushed to the edge of the cliff. Jake and I took hork-bajir limbs in our mouths and growled, worrying them and pretending to chew. In real life, of course, wolves don't immediately show up at the site of forest deaths, but that sort of thing does look more 'realistic' to people who don't know anything about wolves. I dragged a string of intestines from Jara Hamee, looking like I'd disembowelled him.

<Look,> Visser Three announced. <This is the fate of any who dare to defy the Yeerk Empire. The death of a coward.> Personally, I thought he was overselling it a little, but since I was a wolf pretending to eat a fresh corpse and covered in alien blood I couldn't really criticise. The Controllers looked. Their hosts, presumably, saw. I wondered if they would whisper the story between cage bars the next time their yeerks fed, telling people of the two hork-bajir who tried to escape and could find freedom only in death.

The thought made me more sick than the intestines I was pretending to chew on. We should be spreading stories of hope between those bars. But if that was the price of the lives of two free hork-bajir, well, it was an acceptable one.

<We're done here,> Visser Three announced. <Return home, before any of you are spotted by the local humans.> Somebody asked him a question I couldn't hear, and he cocked his head, seeming to consider it. <Clean up? Those wild animals appear to be doing that for us. No, these two are not worth the time.>

I felt his eye on me until he, and the other Controllers, were gone.

Ax gave the all-clear as they left the immediate area, and we demorphed. Jara and Ket stood and gripped each other tightly.

“Free,” Ket Halpak whispered, as if she didn't quite believe it. “We free?”

“Yes,” Jake said, grinning like an idiot. “You're free.”


	10. Chapter 10

“As soon as Visser Three saw over the cliff, I thought we were done for,” Rachel said, shaking her head.

“Me too,” I admitted. “But like Tobias said, whether the hork-bajir survived or not wasn't important to him, so long as the other Controllers – or at least their hosts – are sure they didn't. He knows we can't give them a reason to start the search again, that we have to keep these two secret. His mission's been accomplished.”

“And so has ours,” Jake said. “Ugh!” He stopped to pick a small stone out of his foot.

We'd continued the journey up the mountain as wolves. Without yeerks searching the forest, we were able to move at a more relaxed pace, and we'd needed to demorph before reaching the valley. But Tobias said it was very close, so we hadn't bothered to remorph. Which left us walking through the forest on soft human feet. Fortunately, we could easily heal all the little cuts and bruises we were picking up, but it was still inconvenient.

“Yep, we saved the space goblins,” Marco said, trying (and failing) to sound unimpressed. “Hooray.”

<Look out,> Tobias warned us. <You're almost there.>

“'Look out'?” Marco frowned. “For what, a – whoa.”

The ground opened up before us.

The valley was deep, with steep sides. I hadn't even noticed it until I was practically standing over it. It was aligned East-West, so that the north side would get sunlight the whole day while the South side was in shadow. The South side had a stream, and scrub, and caves. The North was a splash of green, with little shrubs and forest trees and other trees with long, straight trunks, grown almost absurdly tall in their quest for the sun. I imagined being a hork-bajir, smelling the slightly acid crispness of the water, seeing the green and brown below me as a lush rainbow.

Jara and Ket let out jubilant hoots and leapt straight down the incredibly steep side of the valley, easily catching branches on the way down. They dashed back and forth along the valley floor, tasting the water and the bark, looking for caves and in the trees. They were difficult to track through the trees. I made my own way slowly down the valley, and noticed things that couldn't be seen from above. The stream fed into a small, shallow lake that leached away into the stony South wall. There were fish in it. A little field of wild daisies crept partway up the North wall. There'd probably be rabbits in there. Mice, maybe. The valley was well and truly alive.

“You know,” Jake said beside me, “I wonder if this valley ever existed before.”

“You think the ellimist created it?” I asked.

“He's a conservationist, isn't he?” Jake shrugged. “It seems awfully convenient.”

He was right. The location. The valley's alignment with the sun. The water supply. The size. I had no idea how much hork-bajir ate, but there was no way the pair of them would exhaust the bark of so many trees before it had a chance to grow back.

I ran my fingers down a tree trunk. “This is good,” I said. “You remember when we gave him permission to take some humans for a free human colony?”

“Yeah.”

“I hope he gave them somewhere this nice.”

Jake snorted. “Humans would just ruin it.”

“We were scavengers and hunter-gatherers for a really long time before we became agrarian, Jake. And they know more than our ancestors did. Maybe they won't make the same mistakes this time.” I looked up, out of the valley. The sun would set in a couple of hours, but at that point, the light was bright and clear, even if the shadows were long.

A red-tailed hawk dropped from the sky to land on a nearby branch. Ad andalite trotted over. Rachel and Marco headed over to us, from opposite directions. We all stood in the little valley that looked like something out of a fantasy novel, grinning like idiots and feeling happy for a pair of aliens who were, at that moment, exploring everything they could find and talking to each other excitedly in a mixture of their language and ours. They, too, headed over to us.

<Do you like it?> Tobias asked.

“Good water,” Ket Halpak said approvingly. “Good trees. Good place for _kawatnoj_.”

<I've heard you use that word before,> Tobias said. <What does 'kawatnoj' mean?>

“ _Kawatnoj_ is...” Ket Halpak paused, thinking. “Small hork-bajir. Small Ket Halpak, small Jara Hamee.”

“Children,” Rachel said. “They're going to have a little baby hork-bajir.”

<It will be the first hork-bajir born into freedom in a very long time,> Ax said, sounding slightly awed. <The ellimist did not lie. This is indeed a good home for them.>

<No,> Tobias said. <He didn't lie. Not about this.>

There was a short, slightly awkward pause. What was there to say? 'Sorry you're still a hawk'? 'Told you ellimists can't be trusted'?

“Well,” Marco said briskly. “Let's take our clothes off. You know the rules – in the Garden of Eden you don't wear clothes. Rachel, you can start.”

“Garden of Eden?” Jara Hamee echoed. “That this place?”

“Not unless you want to change your name to Adam,” Marco said. “I was just joking, big guy. Hey, I've been meaning to ask. How do you tell a male hork-bajir from a female hork-bajir?”

“Male? Female? What mean?”

Every single Animorph turned to look at me.

“Uh,” I said. It occurred to me that hork-bajir might very well be hermaphroditic or something. The only indication of gender we'd had was Jara Hamee calling Ket Halpak his _kalashi_ , which apparently translated to 'wife'. That wasn't much to go on. I had no idea how to explain the concept. I blushed. “Well. Um... if two people are going to have a baby, if they're human people at least, they're... different...”

Ket Halpak understood. “Ket Halpak and Jara Hamee different,” she said. She pointed to her head. “Jara Hamee have three here. Ket Halpak have two.”

“Is that the only difference?”

“One other difference,” Ket Halpak said primly, “but that only for hork-bajir to know.”

Everyone laughed at that. We couldn't help it. But the hork-bajir were in a good enough mood to laugh as well, even if they didn't get why.

“We _fellana_ ,” Jara Hamee said seriously. He reached out to touch Marco's forehead gently with two fingers. “We thank.” He touched Rachel's forehead, then Jake's, then mine. “You make Jara Hamee, Ket Halpak free.” When he reached Ax, he hesitated. He lifted his chin.

“When _hruthin_ come, they say friends. Then they _ghafrash_. They kill. They...” he looked away and shook his head. But Ket Halpak took his hand in hers and gave it a squeeze, and he looked back. “Even Jara Hamee _atenoj_ say so. When task hard, _hruthin_ kill and run away. But you not kill Jara Hamee, not kill Ket Halpak. You not run away. You help. We thank.” He looked somewhat exhausted. It had been a long, difficult speech for a hork-bajir. But he reached out to touch Ax's forehead, careful to avoid his stalk eyes.

Faster than I could track, Ax whipped his tail-blade forward, over his own shoulder. Much more slowly, he moved it forward to touch the first blade on Jara Hamee's head. Jara grinned.

<You honor me,> Ax said seriously.

Jara looked up to Tobias, on a branch above our heads. He held up one arm. “Guide come talk to Jara Hamee?”

Tobias fluttered down to perch on his arm blade, which he could grip without the risk of cutting into the hork-bajir. Hawk talons are sharp and dangerous, and while Tobias was always very careful with us, it was easy to get scratched while he attempted to keep his balance.

“Many years, Jara Hamee and Ket Halpak want to run. But not know how. Not know where. Jara Hamee have no home now. _Kawatnoj_ come, we have to run. You come, you show. You give us new home. You give us everything.” Gently, carefully, he touched one finger to the hawk's tiny head. “Always, we _fellana_. If ours, yours. Anything. Everything.”

Tobias must have responded, because Jara Hamee nodded and lifted his arm so Tobias could fly off easily. But he did so privately.

“When Ket Halpak small, people from sky everywhere,” Ket Halpak added. “They hurt, kill hork-bajir. Take Ket Halpak, make hurt, kill sky people. Sky people never help. Always take and kill. Until now.” She nodded her head, once. “We thank.”

The shadows of the trees had lengthened, and the air was growing cold. I rubbed my bare arms. We needed to get home soon, or our parents would start to worry.

“You'll be safe here,” Jake said. “But we need to go. Take care of each other, okay?”

Jara touched his forehead blades to those of his _kalashi_. “Always,” he said.


	11. Chapter 11

The hork-bajir valley wasn't exactly an easy hike away, so I didn't go and check on how they were doing that week. Besides, they might have found it intrusive. They were making a home. They probably didn't want a clumsy human stumbling around.

I did go and see Tobias. There wasn't really anything I could say to console him, but I wanted to see how he was doing. I wanted to get a laugh out of him, a joke, even a complaint. I wanted to make sure he was still human inside, not just an incredibly smart hawk.

I hadn't asked exactly what words the ellimist had used to convince Tobias that he would make him human, that applied to giving him back the power to morph. Our previous dealings with him had suggested that he tended to trick rather than lie. But then, we hadn't dealt with him enough to be sure of that. Still, we had free hork-bajir. And Tobias was much safer now that he could morph and heal. That was nothing to complain about.

It had been unnecessarily cruel to trick him, though. Did the ellimist think that Tobias wouldn't help free slaves without that sort of payment, or something?

I went out to his meadow and checked his favourite tree. Empty. I called for him. He didn't respond. It was possible he was off with Ax or something, but most likely, he just didn't want to talk to me. I took the hint and went home.

I'd barely gotten home when mom glanced over at me, and raised an eyebrow. “You're dressing like that?”

I looked down at my jeans and brushed some dirt off one knee. There was bird poop on the cuff. “I always dress like this. What's wrong with it?”

“Well, for the house, yeah, but are you going out in public like that?”

“Public? Where are we going?”

“The award ceremony starts in one hour. Didn't you tell Rachel you'd go?”

The Packard award! In the midst of alien rescue and worrying about a friend's psychological health, I'd completely forgotten about an arbitrary ceremony based on high school grades! I rushed upstairs to put on something that would only offend Rachel, and not everybody present. That is, another pair of jeans, but a clean pair.

The ceremony was... well, an awards ceremony. A bunch of kids' names were read out, they went up to get given a certificate onstage, they shook some hands and lined up. We applauded.

I didn't pay any attention to Chapman's speech about academic excellence and soforth, but I applauded at the right time. The award recipients marched offstage and past us to exit out the back. Taking that as a dismissal, some of the other people got up and started to leave.

Rachel gave us a little 'this is stupid' eyeroll as she walked past. She grinned at her little sisters, Jordan and Sara, who were staging a silent mock cheer, balling up their fists and pretending to wave pompoms. She nodded at her mother, who beamed with pride. I don't think anybody who wasn't looking for it saw how her whole face tightened at the sight of her father, who had flown in for the ceremony. It was the first time, I realised, that she'd seen him since I'd told her what I'd told him.

With people moving about and trying to leave, I almost didn't see the lanky, floppy-haired kid way down in the back until Rachel froze. I couldn't see her face, but I glanced at Jake, standing next to me. His face was white. I wasn't hallucinating, then. He was there. He was actually there.

Tobias looked blank for a moment, then shifted his face into a smile. I saw his lips move. _Hi, Rachel._

She couldn't make a scene by hugging him. We couldn't run down and ask him how he was there, how he was human. That would have to wait until we weren't in a crowded auditorium. But sheer confusion was quickly drowned out by happiness in my mind, and no small measure of relief. Questions could wait. Explanations could wait. Musings about the ellimist could wait.

As irritating as it could be not to be able to explain something, at that moment, for just a few minutes, we let a miracle be a miracle.


End file.
